Next week, I will finally try to give a lecture making general points about consequentialism, and the other ethical perspectives that compete with it. Now, though, I want to discuss one last major problem case for moral theory, and see what consequentialism says about it. The key case is famine relief, but before we talk [...]
Category Archives: philosophical lectures
More cases for consequentialism: abortion and euthanasia
Posted by Chris Hallquist on July 16, 2008
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In the last lecture, I introduced consequentialism in terms of cases where you have to decide who lives and who dies, and the issue of what sorts of decisions in those cases are morally permissible. Today, though, we’re going to talk about cases where it’s mainly one person’s life at stake. The first of these [...]
Consequentialism: harming one to save many
Posted by Chris Hallquist on July 9, 2008
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Some moral questions seem obvious. Others seem not. Moral philosophy, at the level we’ll be discussing it in these next few lectures, is about the questions that aren’t obvious–and sometimes, the questions that just might not be as obvious as they seem. Later, we’ll discuss things such as whether there’s really any such thing as [...]
The problem of evil
Posted by Chris Hallquist on July 2, 2008
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>>>Hey everyone, two questions: first, next week I will begin a series on ethics. I have a fair idea of what I’ll say, ranging from atomic war to abortion to famine with the moral theory of utilitarianism/consequentialism as a unifying theme. I’m basically confident I can handle this well, but I’m a little worried. For [...]
The Argument From Design
Posted by Chris Hallquist on June 25, 2008
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In this lecture, I’m going to talk about the argument from design. This is the last of the traditional Big Three arguments for the existence of God, identified by Kant and others. It claims that by examining the universe and the things it contains, we can see it must be the work of a supremely [...]